How to have a ‘grown-up’ ski season in your 40s

I came to skiing late – I had hit 40 and was trying to find a family holiday that everyone was keen to go on. It worked – what could be better than a week of fresh air atop a beautiful French mountain? There was snow galore, plenty of adrenaline-fuelled fun and a mindboggling quantity of hot chocolate (plus vin chaud for the adults).

Ever since that first family ski holiday, I had often thought about how much fun a ski season would have been in a gap year or just after university. You know the kind of thing: living in the Alps from December to April and working in a bar or a chalet, skiing or snowboarding in your time off, hitting the bars until the small hours and existing on ludicrously little sleep.

Of course, Brexit means that even if I still had the energy to ski and do a full-time job cleaning loos and changing beds, the chances of getting a work permit would be vanishingly small. The specific rules around it vary between countries, but in France you need a job offer and for the employer to have advertised it to EU-qualified people for a time before turning to outside help. The Brexit reality for UK youngsters is that there are plenty of young people from mainland Europe, Ireland (as well as Aussies, who have a reciprocal working holiday agreement) to fill up the seasonal ski jobs without employers needing to deal with the bureaucracy of hiring someone from the UK.

open image in gallery

My chances of ever going on a ski season were, I thought, doomed. Until that is, I discovered the Ski Club of Great Britain’s rep scheme – a different, more concentrated way of doing a season for people who are in it mainly for the skiing rather than the partying. They have reps in Europe and North America, and have recently reintroduced them into a selection of French resorts after being absent for almost a decade.

Read more: The best ski resorts in Italy

Could this be my way into a ski season, a chance to ski for a month or more instead of a week on school holidays? I headed to Tignes in the French Alps to try my hand at being a rep in the company of Mark Brailey, who has been repping for the past four years in Austria, Switzerland and now France.

Mark, 63, lives in Bristol and owns a web marketing company. A laptop and a good broadband…